causalontology-ruby

The Ruby binding of the Causalontology standard — a faithful port of causalontology-py, sharing the same conformance suite.

Zero gems. The Ruby standard library carries everything the standard needs: json (whose parser keeps the integer-versus-decimal source distinction — 1 parses to Integer, 1.0 to Float — so it survives to the canonicalizer), digest (SHA-256 and SHA-512), and Ruby's native bignums with three-argument Integer#pow for the pure-Ruby Ed25519. Requires Ruby 3.0 or newer (CI runs 3.3).

Source file	Implements
lib/causalontology/jcs.rb	RFC 8785 (JSON Canonicalization Scheme) serialization: sorted keys, minimal string escaping, ECMAScript-style canonical numbers (1.0 → 1, 0.7 stays 0.7, e-7 not e-07)
lib/causalontology/canonical.rb	identity-bearing field filtering per kind and SHA-256 content-addressed identify (spec/identity.md)
lib/causalontology/ed25519.rb	pure-Ruby Ed25519 (RFC 8032) over native bignums, verified against the RFC's TEST 1 known answer before any vector runs
lib/causalontology/signing.rb	record-level sign_record / verify_record over canonical identity-bearing bytes (spec/provenance.md); a succession verifies against its predecessor key
lib/causalontology/schema.rb	validation against the eight JSON Schemas in spec/schema/ (a small interpreter for exactly the keywords those schemas use)
lib/causalontology/semantics.rb	the 13 semantic rules: temporal admissibility with the fixed unit constants, the formal conflict test, refinement validity, hierarchy reachability, enrichment field/shape rules
lib/causalontology/store.rb	an in-memory conformant store: idempotent immutable puts, signed add-only records with quarantine, materialized enrichment views with contributors, retraction and succession lineage, the resolve minimum, the deterministic cycle-breaking view rule, and the stigmergy gaps read — Ruby Hashes preserve insertion order, and the iteration order deliberately mirrors the reference store's
conformance.rb	the conformance runner: internal known-answer checks (RFC 8032 TEST 1, RFC 8785 basics), then all 38 vectors, mirroring bindings/python/tests/run_conformance.py exactly

Conformance

$ ruby bindings/ruby/conformance.rb
...
38/38 vectors passed
causalontology-ruby is CONFORMANT to the suite (vectors frozen at specification 1.0.0).

The runner locates the repository root from the CAUSALONTOLOGY_ROOT environment variable when set, otherwise from its own location inside bindings/ruby/; the schemas are read from spec/schema under the same root (overridable with CAUSALONTOLOGY_SPEC, which names the spec/ directory).

The vectors are frozen at specification 1.0.0 (2026-07-13): they carry concrete identifiers, real keys, and a real verifying signature. The harness's old normalization now simply passes frozen values through.

Thirty-second taste

require_relative "lib/causalontology"

store = Causalontology::InMemoryStore.new
press = store.put({ "type" => "occurrent", "label" => "press_button",
                    "category" => "action" })
light = store.put({ "type" => "occurrent", "label" => "light_on",
                    "category" => "state_change" })
claim = store.put({ "type" => "cro", "causes" => [press],
                    "effects" => [light] })

p store.gaps("missing_field")   # the degenerate claim is a visible invitation

sk, source = Causalontology.keypair_from_seed(Digest::SHA256.digest("alice"))
store.put_record(Causalontology.sign_record(
  { "type" => "assertion", "about" => claim, "source" => source,
    "evidence_type" => "imported", "confidence" => 0.5,
    "timestamp" => "2026-07-13T00:00:00Z" }, sk))

Status

Source complete and ported line-for-line from the Python binding; built and executed by GitHub Actions CI (ruby bindings/ruby/conformance.rb on Ruby 3.3 via ruby/setup-ruby) — there is no Ruby interpreter on the authoring machine, so CI is the gate, as it is for every binding.

License: "The attribution always; no profit, no problem license." — see the repository LICENSE and NOTICE.